Sunday, July 09, 2006

On January 28, 1986, Scott Barnes, a DEA contract agent, sat before the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs to testify about American opium smuggling from Southeast Asia. The chairman of the committee was Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming. Other notable nabobs on the committee: Strom Thrumond, George Mitchell, Jeremiah Denton, Alan Cranston and John D. Rockefeller.

Barnes flew in from Los Angeles to testify about the CIA and southeast Asian opium, an underground industry he'd discovered in his search for POWs in Vietnam. He passed lie detector and sodium amytal tests to convince the press ("calls and inimidations from news people escalated ... ") and filled out a sworn affidavit before testifying.

He also spoke to Congressman Solomon, who was "adamant." As an "ex-Marine," said Solomon, "I won't believe any of this."

Barnes was given two hours to testify on the logistics of a covert postwar underground of military and intelligence officers engaged in the drug trade. He explained that some of them had been apprehended and were held captive in Southeast Asian prison camps.

Scott Barnes: "In the midst of my testimony, Brian Bonnet entered and whispered in the ear of Murkowski who immediately announced, 'Excuse me, I must go to the White House.' Not long after his return, he was interrupted again, then announced, 'I should advise you that unofficially we have had word that THE SPACE SHUTTLE CHALLENGER HAS BLOWN UP, and things do not look very good. I have nothing final on that but have just been advised that shortly after launching, there was an explosion. So if anybody wants to be excused, we will certainly understand.'"Barnes, shaken but determined to speak, resumed his testimony ... but "by that time most of the senators and media people had left."1

Moments before, he had addressed a full Congressional committee and a wall of reporters. If not for the Challenger explosion, his account of CIA drug smuggling – and the abandonment of downed pilots overseas – might have made it into public print.

The Challenger explosion was investigated by another "blue ribbon" commission, this one headed up by Nixon ally and Secretary of State William Pierce Rogers, an attorney with a keen professional interest in both the CIA and the heroin industry.Architect's rendering of the William P. Rogers Building, 2001 K Street, Washington, D.C.

As background, this was culled this from the Lake Erie Reporter:

"Harken [Oil Co., owned by GHW Bush] was connected to the drug trade, the manipulation of foreign currencies and the CIA’s efforts to destabilize the government of Argentina. Harken’s major owners were George Soros, the Harvard [University] Management Corporation, and Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, a Saudi investor." William Rogers

Bakhsh was legally represented by Rogers & Wells, the New York law firm of William P. Rogers. Bakhsh "arranged for Union des Banques Swisses, to invest $25 million in the firm. The Swiss bank was connected to the corrupt banking conglomerate BCCI, which collapsed amid scandal in 1992. BCCI has been called the most corrupt bank in modern times, having financed terrorists, drug dealers, and various covert operations."2

Rewind to 1986, Scott Barnes and his explosive Senate testimony. Recall that when he began to wade into detail in his brief to Senator Simpson's committee, someone seated directly behind him burst out in a whisper, "Oh, God, NO!"

Someone was very anxious about the politics of heroin in Southeast Asia. Who might that be?

Barnes: "The videos of the hearing show a very restless Ann Mills Griffiths seated directly behind me."

Ms. Griffiths was the head of the National League of Families, and though she was a vocal proponent of the POW issue, her many critics maintained that she frustrated efforts to resolve the MIA question behind the scenes.

In 1993, her name surfaced in connection with Richard Childress of the Reagan-Bush National Security Council, as reported by USA Today: "A Reagan administration official secretly funneled money from a POW-MIA group seeking information on missing Americans to help anti-communist rebels in Laos, a Senate report said Wednesday. Richard Childress, a National Security Council staffer, channeled the money during the early 1980s operation... Childress received about $200,000 working with Ann Mills Griffiths, head of the POW-MIA group, the National League of Families, and John LeBoutillier, a former New York Republican congressman.

"The operation 'sounds like a dry run' for the Iran-contra affair, said Jack Blum, a former Senate investigator. ...''3

The NSC's Dick Childress was another ne'er-do-well involved in the importation of heroin from Laos.4 And the Challenger explosion occurred at the very moment testimony about heroin smuggling was heard in Senate chambers.

Could this be a factor in the concurrent timing of the Challenger disaster? Political researcher Mae Brussell provided details of the launch and posited that the Challenger explosion was premeditated:

"Memorandum detailing a 'catastrophic' disaster if the shuttle was launched in less than 50 degrees Fahrenheit was presented to NASA in July 1985, and again in August 1985 by two different scientists. Did NASA, and the Pentagon, select the time when they demanded a lunch on the coldest day in shuttle history?

"The Challenger shuttle, unlike any other launch, waited outside in rain and cold for 38 days. Television cameras focused upon the ice coating and huge icicles at the time of the launch. Ice teams were sent out to 'check.'

"It was not always cold at Cape Canaveral. The Rogers Commission limited their public inquiry into launching decisions to the evening of January 27th and the morning of the 28th of January 1986. Plans for an earlier launch on Saturday, January 25th,1986 were postponed because of dust storms in Africa and Morocco. It is interesting that the weather, so far away, was conveyed to the launch team at the top of the their pyramid. The same decision makers couldn't see ice, or feel freezing temperature around them at Cape Canaveral.

"It was not a matter of seeing or feeling the cold.... Challenger would leave on the morning of January 28, 1986. Weather was not a factor considered, then or now.

"Robert Lund, Vice President for Engineering at Morton Thiokol, the company who made the controversial solid fuel boosters, was told to "stop making an engineering decision." ... The other hat was military. Lund changed directions and took orders. Life is cheap for the Pentagon.

"Sunday turned out to be a fine day for a launch. Was there too much media competition with the Super bowl Sunday, with Reagan's 'teacher in space' production, after two years of publicity? The hundreds of press, teachers, and students waiting at Cape Canaveral, could have seen a fine launch on Sunday, Monday afternoon or even Tuesday afternoon when it was muchwarmer.

"NASA officials had been alerted by Sunday that a cold front was coming in Monday night or Tuesday for sure. Indications were that weather was always a factor in safely launching a shuttle."5It was "the coldest day in shuttle history," and yet Challenger launched... And Barnes returned to California, an obscure DEA contract agent completely unaware that had his testimony on the CIA and drugs had the potential of wiping out the prospects of two future occupiers of the Oval office, GHW Bush and son. At the very least, the CIA would have had its feet put to the fire one more time. And should the name "Childress" have emerged, the Iran-contra investigation would likely have focused on heroin, not hostages. ---------NOTES

Saturday, July 08, 2006

Thursday, July 06, 2006

BY ALEX CONSANTINE---"The 9/11 attack was the parallel to the Pinochet coup ... Operation Condor ... Pinochet also imposed extraordinary police powers ... After 9/11, thousands of Arabs and Muslims were also rounded up by the US military and kept in prison in secret ... They were also tortured ... 9/11 was the equivalent of a coup for Bush. Its version of Operation Condor is beingassembled in the Pentagon by Undersecretary of Defense Stephen Cambone and his military deputy, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin ..." – Maria Montelibre

"In this world, in this strange world of covert overthrow of governments and clandestine armies and secret operations, the problem we're facing is that you are working with two realities: you're working with ... exchange of power, economic power, power over people, controlling their lives. In order to do that you disguise certain persons and send them into roles to influence. They become actors on a stage and they influence our minds in a way that is not real, but effect a reality that will touch us later." – Mae Brussell, Dialogue Assassination, Broadcast no. 16, October 13, 1971---To Mussolini, "fascismo," a word he coined, had dual meanings. It is rooted in the Latin "fasces," a rather strange-looking axe with poles strapped to it, but the term also meant "Group."

Christopher Deliso at Antiwar.com found the 9/11 group when he poked into the Plame investigation, "a relay team of hawkish officials providentially placed throughout various government agencies." The serpentine network wound through the CIA, Pentagon, Office of Special Plans, State Department, DIA, NSA and other federal agencies. Deliso describedoperatives darkening the wings of the Libby investigation, but the same could be said of the 9/11 inquiry: the same "relay team" performed "a handoff of information from the point of origin (the CIA) to the ultimate 'commissioners' of the inquiry." Given the "intra- and inter-factional nature of all of these agencies, it is understandable why the highest officials in the land jostled to get their 'people' strategically inserted throughout the departments, where they could garner inside information and hinder the objectives of their ostensibly direct employers whenever they conflicted with the goals of their real minders..."1

The "minders" were represented by George Schultz and his Hoover "scholars" at the Bush grooming sessions early in his first run for the White House. The Morgan, Rockefeller and Harriman syndicates whose interests are served by the think tanks sprawl, too. Skyscrapers have crumbled beneath their feet.

These are the Royals. Royals set loose their hounds for the installation of a dictatorship in Chilé: Kissinger, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the CIA and a military junta on September 11, 1973 ... ---CIA acknowledges involvement in Allende's overthrow,Pinochet's riseSeptember 19, 2000?WASHINGTON (AP) -- The CIA is acknowledging for the first time the extent of its deep involvement in Chile, where it dealt with coup-plotters, false propagandists and assassins ...---Twenty-five years before the CIA posted a public confession, Howard Zinn went ahead anyways and reported that Operation Condor, "the CIA action to overthrow Allende, was approved by the 40 Committee, whose chairman [was] Henry Kissinger. And it was Kissinger who recommended that Rockefeller head the commission to investigate the CIA.

Rockefeller summed up the commission report: 'There are things that have been done which are in contradiction to the statutes, but in comparison to the total effort, they are not major.' The same report can be made on the Corleone family ..."2

How "in contradiction to the statutes" was Condor? So in contradiction that the river running through Santiago was dammed by headless bodies. How many statutes did that contradict?

Regime change has long been a staple of US foreign policy. Exactly 28 years later, it happened again. But the strategy had evolved with the times. The idea was not to merely impose military rule on a defenseless population, but to rechannel resources of government - its finances, military force, technology, personnel and secrets - their way.

The early "jostling" to insert the 9/11 relay team behind Bush resulted in the appointment of Donald H. Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld was among the the central genocidists engaged in Operation Condor I.

"Latin America: Murder, Inc.," a classified report prepared by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Subcommittee on International Operations, revealed the origins of Condor. The title reiterated a confession by Lyndon Johnson a few months before his death: "We were running a Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean." The Senate report explained that the U.S. had "jointoperations between Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The joint operations were known as Operation Condor. These are special teams used to carry out [the] killing of enemies." Jack Anderson offered a glimpse of "Operation Condor, An Unholy Alliance" on August 3, 1979: "Assassination teams are centered in Chile. This international consortium islocated in Colonia Dignidad, Chile. Founded by the SS, led by Franz Pfeiffer Richter, Adolf Hitler's 1000-year Reich may not have perished. Children are cut up in front of their parents, suspects are asphyxiated in piles of excrement or rotated to death over barbecue pits." Colonel Otto Skorzeny, a postwarm CIA recruit, code-named the Battle of the Bulge Operation Greif - "Condor."3

Another CIA recruit oversaw the Chilean incarnation of Condor.

Global Research reports: "Henry Kissinger belongs in the dock alongside the Chilean dictator.... He remains a prominent figure in the affairs of the US ruling establishment and is protected by the government. In 2002, the Bush administration attempted unsuccessfully to name this war criminal as the head of the 'independent' panel investigating the September 11,2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

"George Bush senior should be the subject of an indictment for the role the CIA played under his direction in fostering and covering up for the assassination squads that roamed Latin America and, ultimately, the streets of Washington.

"The most prominent figures in the Bush administration - Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - are likewise implicated. Cheney was the White House chief of staff during the Condor Operation, while Rumsfeld was defense secretary, supervising US ties to the Latin American military."4

Rumsfeld crony George Schultz established business ties with the Pinochet regime, and learned a thing or two about fascist economics for grafting to domestic policies. Independent Latin journalist Maria Montelibre writes, "General Pinochet’s Labor Minister and Mining Minister in those days, José Piñera, is a Harvard educated boy, friend of George Schultz, among others. Piñera is now head of the Cato Institute Privatization Project in the U.S., which supports and instigates Bush’s privatization schemes. Piñera planned the Social Security privatization plan in Chile with Dictator Pinochet."5

The Condor is Rumsfeld's again, and it was spotted by a reporter for Ireland's Village magazine in 2004: "Extraordinary Rendition bears more than a passing resemblance to operation Condor, the 'multinational of terror' organised by six US-backed Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s." The Latin American terror program crossed national borders. "Regimes swapped suspects and facilitated death squads and kidnap teams. Suspects were disappeared without a trace, held without due process and monitored by physicians during torture sessions." The post-9/11, Condor-like rendition program was "first mooted inside the offices of US intelligence," at the behest of Donald Rumsfeld.6

Others noticed haunting similarities between Condor and Rumsfeld's "war on terror." An editorial appeared in The Nation in January 2005: "Did anyone in the Bush White House cast an uneasy eye over the new indictment of Gen. Augusto Pinochet? It may seem over the top to mention that old buzzard in the same breath as an elected US President. But consider Task Force 6-26. It sounds like a relic of Pinochet's Operation Condor.... Task Force 6-26 is a secret unit composed mostly of US Navy SEALs operating in Baghdad - its existence unacknowledged by the Pentagon. According to the Washington Post, a fact-finding mission for Army generals warned a year ago that Task Force 6-26 was running an off-the-books prison for detainees."7

But Rumsfeld coordinated with others in Washington operating on behalf of the "minders," as William Blum notes: "1973, September 11, CHILE: President Allende overthrown by General Pinochet in a bloody coup in which 3000 Chileans are massacred. The Rockefellers' ITT corp., now run by John McCloy, donates $1 million to the coup effort, which is orchestrated by Henry Kissinger."8

The planning was conceived in pitiless detail by social engineers. In the 1960s, Abt Associates - a consulting firm founded by Clark C. Abt, a German who migrated to the U.S. in 1937, earned a degree at MIT and joined Raytheon after the war - assisted the Pentagon and CIA with Project Camelot, a computer model for destabilizing foreign governments. Socialist scholar Guerry Hoddersen writes that Abt Associates "developed a simulation game called Politica that drew information from a computer linking the files of the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department. Politica was used in training Third World police" and predicting "which social forces could be mobilized against leftist governments."9

As early as 1965, the American Anthropological Association's executive board began to receive complaints concerning social engineering projects in the Third World. The DoD and CIA recruited anthropologists to assist in counterinsurgency operations, and from this program rose Project Camelot with its cynical code-name. The Army, according to the AAA, "had a contract with American University to study sociopolitical factors that could lead to internal warfare in that country."10

A survey of Condor undertaken by an independent Virtual Truth Commission ("Telling the Truth for a Better America") exposed the "minders" of the coup:

".......1976-OPERATION CONDOR, SOUTH AMERICAN ASSASSINATION CARTEL, THE YEAR GEORGE BUSH SR. IS CIA DIRECTOR. In 1976, Nelson Rockefeller was Vice President (to Ford), and his advisor Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State. In this year Kissinger's puppet dictator Pinochet, of Chile, organised Operation CONDOR, to co-ordinate death squad assassinations by the secret police of the dictators of Chile, Brasil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay . 30,000 leftists were assassinated/ executed/"disappeared."... Many of the top ranking Nazi war criminals in South America are believed to have lived in Colonia Dignidad. In 1993, a cache of documents called the 'ARCHIVES OF TERROR' was found in Paraguay detailing Nazi war criminal involvement in Operation Condor, and listing victims, including Israeli agents who were trying to find Nazis to bring to trial. It is highly probable that George Bush and Henry Kissinger knew about, and directed, Operation CONDOR. General Pinochet was never ashamed of his pro-Nazi fetish, preferring Nazi uniforms and marching music. In 1985 an American professor, Boris Weisfeiler, was disappeared at Colonia Dignidad. Today Dignidad is a prospering commune valued at $5 billion, but closed to the public and protected by the Chilean military. Today David Rockefeller is the scion of his families' empire, running Chase-Manhattan Bank, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and Rockefeller Center, NYC. Kissinger was Bush jr's choice to head the September 11th investigation. Paul Bremer III, former Director of Kissinger Associates, was Bush's appointed ruler of Iraq."11---NOTES

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

The transition from TRW in Redondo Beach to Cleveland's NASA Glenn Research Center wasn't easy for Dan Goldin. "I came out of the black (budget) world,'' he explained in 1999. "I never dealt with the public like I did (at NASA). Whenever I had meetings, it was in private rooms, in special buildings.''1 But he steeled his nerves, came out of the federal "black" closet and closed the door rather firmly behind.

NASA's website notes that Goldin entered the space biz in Cleveland back in 1962. He worked on electric propulsion systems for "human interplanetary travel" back when the facility was known as the Lewis Center.2

TRW tested a high-powered electronic propulsion system at Edwards Air Force Base on March 15, 1999. An Air Force release explains that the experimental drive "was based on high-powered electric propulsion provided by a 26 kilowatt ammonia fueled arcjet." This was "an effort by the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Propulsion Directorate to demonstrate its use in space, and evaluate performance and interactions with other experiments and spacecraft systems. The prime contractor for the experiment was TRW. "They incorporated the electric propulsion expertise of their subcontractor, Primex AerospaceCompany of Redmond WA. The experimental propulsion system is part of the payload of a DoD space test program scientific satellite called Advanced Research and Global Observation Satellite, or ARGOS, built by Boeing."3ARGOS weighed three tons. It was billed as the most advanced "R&D satellite" ever launched by the US Air Force. It ran ion propulsion, space dust and high-temperature semiconductor experiments, was outfitted with ionospheric instruments and the Naval Research Lab’s hard x-ray detectors for binary star timing observations. Loaded for bear.

It was, however, a long-delayed project - ARGOS only made it into orbit on the ELEVENTH LAUNCH ATTEMPT.4 And the Flash Gordon arcjet propulsion system wasn't used for interplanetary travel. It wasn't even really intended primarily for scientific research and development, as advertised. "ARGOS," SpaceWarn Bulletin, published by NASA's National Space Science Data Center, stated flatly, "is an American MILITARY spacecraft."5 There is a trove of technological state secrets tucked away in Dan Goldin's hippocampus and that's where they remain, as the Jewish Journal's Mark Arnold discovered in a 2001 interview:

JJ. "What about Israel. Have you been involved there?"

DG: "I’ve been very engaged with the development of the technology program in Israel. I feel very good about the relationships I’ve made there. I’ve met with all the leaders at one time or another: Sharon, Barak, Netanyahu, Ezer Weizman. I had relationships with Israel before I went to NASA and strengthened them there."

JJ: "You helped with their space program and their astronaut program, didn’t you?"

DG: "I’d rather not talk about that...."

He gave the world Orwellian advancements:

"NASA develops 'mind-reading' system"

"A computer program which can read silently spoken words by analysing nerve signals in our mouths and throats, has been developed by NASA ..."6

The organization's research manager Herb Schlickenmaier explained to the press that the mind-reading machines weren't ready for widespread use. He just want Northwest Airlines to test them. "There are baby steps for us to walk through before we can make any pronouncements," he said.7 Thus it is that the phrases "biometric access" and "neural control" have entered the Homeland Security section of the American lexicon.8

Scientists behind the black curtain, in their own "private rooms" and "special buildings," were busy with the "alternative" bio-engineering experiments that enthralled Goldin.

And, mysteriously, scientists involved in classified NASA projects around the world were dropping like flies...

There was a collective sigh of relief when Goldin left the space agency. Todd Halvorson, Cape Canaveral Bureau Chief for Florida Today, wrote in November 2001, "NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin has dominated the U.S. civil space program for nearly a decade, ruling the nation's space agency with an iron fist." He was "a figure both revered and reviled within U.S.aerospace circles....

"For Goldin, life after NASA will start with the non-profit Council on Competitiveness, a think tank created in 1986 to foster technological innovation and workforce development while benchmarking the performance of the U.S. economy against those of other nations."9

Dan Goldin didn't exactly put his best foot forward handling his own share of the economy, however. The Associated Press reported in 2000 that NASA "made a $590 million bookkeeping error in its 1999 financial report and a congressman is demanding an explanation from the agency. 'I'm deeply disappointed that the agency that could send a man to the moon now can't even balance its books to the nearest half-billion,' Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., chairman of the HouseScience Committee, said in a statement Thursday.... The error was overlooked by both NASA's financial office and the Arthur Andersen independent accounting firm."

7) http://www.bvalphaserver.com/article-print-3915.htmlAlso see:http://www.wren-network.net/events/bios/hschlickenmaier.htm:Schlickenmaier is the director of programs and policy integration for NASA's Headquarters Office of Aerospace Technology. "He is responsible for establishing program policy for the Aerospace Technology Enterprise consisting of program formulation, program coordination and integration, as well as assessing the progress of programs against plans across the Aerospace Technology Enterprise. He is also responsible for establishing policy and standards with the Aeronautics Technology, Innovative Technology Transfer Partnerships, Mission and Science Measurement, and Space Launch Initiative Themes and their associated programs. In 1996, Mr. Schlickenmaier was selected to serve on the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, and was responsible for aviation safety and advanced air traffic technology activities on the Commission staff."